Mrs. Jellyby & St. John of the Cross

Jim Forest on Activism & Prayer

Among the cautionary characters the reader encounters in Charles Dickens’s
novel of the 1840s, Bleak House, is Mrs. Jellyby, who resolutely devotes
every waking hour to the “Borrioboola-Gha venture.” The reader never
discovers the details of the endeavor except that it involves the settlement
of impoverished Britons among African natives with the goal of supporting themselves
through coffee growing.

Mrs. Jellyby is convinced that no other undertaking in life is so worthwhile,
or would solve so many problems at a stroke. Dickens’s interest is not
in the project, however, but rather in Mrs. Jellyby, who is so wedded to her
work that she has no time for her several children, with the exception of Caddy,
a daughter she has conscripted as her secretary. Ink-spattered Caddy puts in
nearly as many hours as her mother in the daily task of answering letters and
sending out literature about Borrioboola-Gha.

Caddy, however, has come to hate the very word “Africa” or any word
that has the remotest suggestion of causes. For her, causes simply mean the
ruin of family life. Mrs. Jellyby’s husband eventually becomes suicidal
and, though surviving despair, is last seen in the book with his head resting
despondently on a wall.

In the book’s postscript, we discover that the Borrioboola-Gha project
failed after the local king sold the project’s volunteers into slavery
in order to buy rum. Mrs. Jellyby quickly found another cause to occupy her
time, “a mission with more correspondence than the old one,” thus
providing a happy ending for a permanent campaigner.

The Mrs. Jellybys

While few in the social movements so radically neglect those in their care,
unfortunately I cannot think of Mrs. Jellyby merely as a caricature. When my
wife and I talked about her, we could think of several people, of both sexes,
resembling her in many details: people with a legitimate concern but engaging
themselves so fully that their fixation has wreaked havoc in the lives of those
around them, and probably done a great deal to drive many people they intended
to influence in the opposite direction.

While in theory dedicated to compassion, the Mrs. Jellybys I’ve often
known seem to be driven by anger with those around them, whom they can punish
with a clear conscience by taking up a virtuous cause.

I recall one activist who wasn’t able to attend his daughter’s marriage
because of a demonstration that day. Another man, more Gandhian than Gandhi,
when left in charge of the office of the Committee for Nonviolent Action while
the rest of the staff was away being arrested and jailed, nearly starved the
office cat to death because his conscience opposed the domestication of animals.
Whatever food the cat found during those austere weeks, it was not from his
ideology-guided hand.

It is a dilemma that the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, discussed in the 1960s
in one of his letters (included in The Hidden Ground of Love) he sent
me. “One of the problematic questions about nonviolence is the inevitable
involvement of hidden aggressions and provocations,” he said, especially
in those who are not “spiritually developed.” There is

[t]he danger one observes subtly in tight groups like families and monastic
communities, where the martyr for the right sometimes thrives on making his
persecutors terribly and visibly wrong. He can drive them in desperation to
be wrong, to seek refuge in the wrong, to seek refuge in violence. . . .
In our acceptance of vulnerability, we play [on the guilt of the opponent].
There is no finer torment. This is one of the enormous problems of our time . . .
all this guilt and nothing to do about it except finally to explode and blow
it all out in hatreds, race hatreds, political hatreds, war hatreds. We, the
righteous, are dangerous people in such a situation. . . .
We have got to be aware of the awful sharpness of truth when it is used as
a weapon, and since it can be the deadliest weapon, we must take care that
we don’t kill more than falsehood with it.

Because of my own experience, I tend to think especially of the peace movement,
but it hardly matters what movement it is that one belongs to: left or right,
red or green, nationalist or trans-nationalist, large or small. The cause could
be pacifism, feminism, marxism, anarchism, vegetarianism, libertarianism, anti-communism,
states rights, human rights, animal rights, some political party, or one’s
religion.

In any case, ideology, not compassion, tends to become the driving force of
much activism. Compassion, however much the word may be used, rarely thrives
within the climate of movements and causes, except a very narrow compassion
focused like a spotlight on a victim group whose needs legitimate the cause.

Perhaps one of the main functions of ideology is to confine the area of compassion,
so that, for example, one feels compassion for the baby seal being slaughtered
for its fur but not for the man whose family may presently depend upon the fur
trade; or feels compassion for one group of war casualties but not another.

Cause-directed ideology also serves the function of keeping its users in a constant
state of guilt and anger: guilt because one can never become the person the
cause requires and expects of its adherents; and anger because there are never
enough people ready to join the group and there are always those, even vast
numbers, who either stand in opposition or don’t seem to care.

The Spanish Mrs. Jellybys

I suspect St. John of the Cross would easily recognize Mrs. Jellyby and identify
her Spanish counterparts. The sixteenth-century Spanish Church was not short
on ideology or in people whose ecclesiastical purposefulness was matched by
harshness to those around them. It was a climate in which the Inquisition met
a profound need: Ideology must find and punish those who oppose it or fail to
measure up to its demands. (Punishment of ideological offenders today must be
done mainly with words rather than torture and bonfires, though the fires built
of words can blaze very hot.)

St. John of the Cross’s opposition to religious ideology and its structures,
which made him a prisoner for a time, was not protest in a form that we would
quickly recognize as such. Rather it took the form of building up communities
of mystical life in which, in community with the poor, the members disowned
many familiar comforts, including shoes, thereby getting their name, “the
shoeless Carmelites.”

St. John of the Cross encouraged everyone to live a mystical life. Perhaps
in those days this seemed nearly as outrageous as it does in our own world.
The word “mystical” sounds so remote and other-worldly, suggesting
to many a sort of person indifferent to the needs and problems of his neighbors.
(One finds that sort of figure in the cast of Bleak House as well:
There is the Reverend Mr. Chadband, whose pastoral devotion makes it easier
for him to notice a potential donor than a person in rags.)

To get rid of misleading stereotypes about mysticism, one must ask: What is
mystical life? It is firsthand experience of God. It is the difference between
the menu and the meal. “Taste and see how good the Lord is,” we
are told by the psalmist, not “read about God and his goodness.”
It is one of the primary eucharistic invitations.

We are not summoned to a verbal excursion but to an actual experience, as real
and indescribable as tasting an orange. Not even Shakespeare can give us in
words the taste of an orange. Not even St. John the Evangelist can put God into
words. Each of us must either taste for ourselves or settle for religious press
clippings.

St. John of the Cross insists that there is nothing remarkable about moving
from secondhand to firsthand experience, from becoming informed about God to
being a participant in God. Nor could there be any event more transforming in
our lives or of greater consequence to those around us, for we would see ourselves
and others with new eyes and live without the fears that so often limit or paralyze
our responses or make them self-serving. St. John’s poems, and his essays
about these poems, are entirely on this subject.

Nor does he suggest that one must be clever to be a mystic. God is not reserved
for the smart people—rather they are the one’s most likely to get
in their own way, to wall themselves in—and God out—with words,
causes, and ideology.

Avoiding Mysticism

Ideology has the advantage over mysticism of being controllable. It is “well-lit.”
We can more or less comprehend it and to some small extent define its shape,
although in the end, it defines our shape.

God is not comprehensible and definable. God is, compared to “well-lit,”
an infinite darkness, a light that seems like night. Thus St. John’s “dark
night of the soul.” St. John is a spiritual journalist reporting on how
it is one must pass through blindness (the cross) in order to see (and thus
rise from death). It is a terrifying passage, but finally one gets to see, not
simply to hear about seeing.

Perhaps for these reasons—the desire for the controllable and the terror
of the uncontrollable—mysticism is something social movements generally
avoid. In many groups dedicated to peace and justice, even ones with some religious
basis, the word mysticism, if said at all, is pronounced with derision,
as if to say, the true social activist has no time to be a mystic, for mysticism
cannot possibly have anything to do with untying the knots in our disordered
world.

There is too much to be done, too many urgent needs to be met, to permit indulgence
in long liturgies, religious rites, penitential activities, examinations of
conscience, periods of silence and withdrawal, etc. If religion is tolerated
at all, it must be kept in a well-governed corner under the strict regulation
of ideology and peer-group control.

This kind of climate, of course, remains spiritually very shallow and inevitably
results in many cases of “burn-out”—psychological and physical
exhaustion that makes it impossible for the activist to continue. At least a
long pause is required.

How different our work for social healing would be if it were nourished by
a deep spiritual life! As St. John of the Cross wrote in the Spiritual Canticles
(xxix, 3):

Let those that are great activists and think to circle the world with words
and outward works note that they would bring far more profit to the Church
and be far more pleasing to God if they spent even half [the time given to
action] in being present with God in prayer. . . . Most certainly
they would accomplish more with one piece of work than they now do with a
thousand and do so with far less labor. For through prayer they would merit
the result, and themselves be made spiritually strong. Without prayer, they
would do much hammering but achieve little, even nothing at all or even cause
harm.

Perhaps we are at a moment in history, with many ideologies in a state of collapse,
when we can imagine that mysticism would lay a foundation for social action
that would not only produce useful results, rather than results quite opposite
what is intended, but also refresh us day by day as we seek to build up a nonviolent
social order.

Love’s Measure

St. John of the Cross said: “Love is the measure by which we shall be
judged.” It is a quotation I first heard from Dorothy Day, founder of
the Catholic Worker movement, a woman devoted to both St. Teresa and St. John,
who spent much of her time each day in prayer and yet is rightly remembered
as one of the great social activists in American history.

Again and again, John of the Cross reminds us that God is love. We move toward
God through no other path than love itself. It is not a love expressed in words
or slogans or ideologies but actual love, love experienced in God, love that
lets us know others not through our ideas and fears but through God’s
love for them, so that we see them not only as enemies but also as estranged
(even if deranged or pathological) relatives.

How are we to make our way out of the various ideological corners in which we
find ourselves? In my own life, nothing has been more helpful than the rediscovery
of the richness of liturgical life, an unexpected gift that I have received
by getting to know the Orthodox Church, renowned for its long liturgies and
its tradition of standing rather than sitting in church.

But many of us, Orthodox included, face the problem of finding ourselves in
parishes in which the Liturgy often resembles a television program made to fit
into an hour’s space. Ordinary parish worship at times seems more an obstacle
to mystical life than an opening. In such cases we must imagine what can be
rather than what is, in the meantime doing what we can with the resources at
hand, in the parish, at nearby monasteries, and, most of all, at home.

A great part of the process of healing the world is healing the Church, which
means, in part, to recover traditions of spiritual life that have been greatly
damaged over the centuries. St. John of the Cross can be a companion in the
process of repairing the division within our own spiritual life and of encouraging
us as we seek to experience the God who makes all things new.

Jim Forest is secretary of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship
and edits its publication, “In Communion.” He is the author of many
books, including The Ladder of the Beatitudes, Praying with Icons,
and Living with Wisdom: A Biography of Thomas Merton (all published
by Orbis Books). He lectures widely and leads retreats at centers in both the
United States and England. He and his wife Nancy have six children and make
their home in Alkmaar, Holland, a city northwest of Amsterdam.

“Mrs. Jellyby & St. John of the Cross” first appeared in the October 2001 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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